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Monthly Archives: May 2015

This year’s student book budget group has been one of the largest groups, but one of the most thorough groups I’ve had. To recap, our student book budget group is a group of 4th and 5th grade students who develop a reading interest survey, gather data from the whole school, analyze the data, set purchasing goals, meet with vendors, and spend a budget of approximately $2000. I assist them, but the decisions are completely driven by students.

This year, we got started a bit late, so we didn’t get all of our books until the very last week of school. After a lot of debate, the students decided to prepare the books for checkout, enjoy looking at them, and then set them aside for the beginning of the school year next year. It was a hard decision, but we think it will be so exciting to walk into the library on the first week of school with over 150 new books to choose from.

On our final day together, some of the students gathered in the library for the big unpacking. We highlighted the books on our packing list, inspected them, stamped them with the library stamp, and started enjoying them. One student said, “This needs to be your motto. Unpack, stamp, and enjoy.”

We realized that several of the books were cataloged as fiction but were really graphic novels, so we took time to label all of those books with a graphic novel sticker so that they could be easily found with other graphic novels.

Once the books were enjoyed by the students, we sorted them into stacks by type of book and took their pictures. These pictures will be used next year to promote the books at the beginning of the year. It was fun to see all of the books grouped together to actually see how we distributed the money between our goals. I think some of us realized we may have been a bit heavy in some areas of our budget, but I don’t think anyone will be disappointed in these great selections.

We thank Capstone and Avid Bookshop who were huge supporters of this project. We wish the books were checked out right now, but with only one day of school left, we will wait with anticipation for the big checkout day. It will be a nice way to inform students about the project who might want to participate next year. My plan is to start much earlier next year!

I have to take a moment to brag on another teacher and group of students in our school. Kelly Hocking is an amazing Kindergarten teacher, and she has a talented group of Kindergarten students who are some of the biggest researchers and creators in our school. I love how each year she finds something that her class takes an interest in and somehow weaves into every subject area and standard that they study in Kindergarten. One year it was art. Another year it was a study of maps and stretching the imagination. This year it was space.

Kelly never knows at what point in the year something will pop up as an interest in her class, but this year it happened when they were doing a GoNoodle. It happened to feature space, and it took the class into a series of questions and wonderings about space.

They started reading lots of books about space as well as studying the science standards about the day and night sky.

The more they read, the more they started to notice about space popping up in so many areas of their curriculum and life.

They launched into research mode and asked lots of questions. In the library and classroom they used print and digital resources to learn about the planets and collect facts about each one.

In February, the class celebrated Fat Tuesday by dressing as planets and parading around the school. Each costume was space-inspired and they handed out coins and beads to lots of classes.

Research continued in the classroom and the media center. Students used all of their facts to write a series of notes. In groups, the students put those notes in an order that made sense and prepared to make their own ebooks about space using the Storykit app.

At this point, we were approaching poetry month, so I suggested that the students think about space poetry. I connected the class with several poetry books about space, and they started crafting some poems in class. Ms. Kelly also has ukuleles in her classrooms, so the poems eventually were turned into songs with music composed by the students.

At our annual Poem In Your Pocket day, the groups of students performed their poetry songs for a live audience. We even had poet, Laura Purdie Salas, listen in to the poetry since students were inspired by her space poems and songs.

At this point in the year, lots of attention turned to Mars and space exploration. Students really didn’t want to travel to Mars themselves, but they did want to think about helping other people get there some day. We created a Padlet to collect all of our research in the library and the classroom.

Eventually, the students wanted to start making some inventions to help Mars explorers, so we did a lot of tinkering in our Makerspace. In class, students constructed elaborate prototypes of their inventions and did informational writing to accompany their creations.

If we had more time in our year, I’m sure Ms. Kelly and her students would have come up with even more miraculous things, but it truly was an amazing year of exploration and I’m glad that our library was a part of it.

You can read more about the library parts of this project in these posts:

Also, you can view Ms. Kelly’s full deck of slides which includes lyrics to a cumulative song that explores all of the planets and the facts the students learned. They performed this song at our end of the year assembly.

Each year we have a program called Battle of the Books in 3rd-5th grade. This is a reading competition where teams of 5 students read a list of 10 books. They work together to answer questions about the books in several rounds of competition in order to be crowned the Battle of the Books Champion. Each year there are students who don’t participate in battle of the books for many reasons. Sometimes they are unsure if they want to do it and by the time they decide it’s too late. Sometimes they have too many other things going on that they can’t fit it in. Whatever the reason, there are students who are left out. This year, one of our teachers, Ms. Mills, recognized that in 3rd grade and wanted to give these students a 2nd chance to participate.

Since we are near the end of the year, reading the long chapter books that are on the regular list weren’t reasonable to consider, so she pulled several books that students could realistically finish, understand, and compete with. Students read these books in small groups as well as during state testing when they finished their test.

Deciding to choose new books meant that there weren’t questions written for these books, so she knew she would have to come up with every question asked. I love what she decided to do. She took the books to a 5th grade class and asked them if they would read the books and come up with questions to ask the 3rd graders. The 5th grade students worked with their teacher to craft questions and they put their names on each question written. During the competition, Ms. Mills or Ms. Garrett would say who a question was written by.

We decided to broadcast the competition through Google Hangouts on Air so that all 3rd grade classes could watch and support their friends. I setup the hangout and emailed the link to all of the teachers, and of course, we now have an archive of our competition for anyone else who wants to watch. Students helped pull the questions from a basket of questions and the teachers asked them. Each team received 8 questions and the teachers kept track of which team got the most questions correct. It was a tight competition because the students knew the books so well.

I take no credit for any of this competition, but I just had to highlight what these teachers and students did. Bravo to Ms. Mills and Ms. Garrett for giving even more of our students a voice in this fun competition during the busy end-of-the-year rush. They all did an awesome job, represented our school well, and showed that they knew their books well!

Two parts of our 2015 student book budget arrived! It’s always exciting when I can email the students and tell them that the books are here. They’ve been asking me almost daily since we placed the order.

All of our books from Avid Bookshop arrived during our author visit with Sarah Weeks. The first box of Capstone books arrived while our 5th graders were at Skidaway Island. I emailed the whole book budget group and told them to come today at noon to unpack books.

Our timeline has been a bit crunched this year. We are almost out of school days and book check out is already coming to an end for the school year. I need to do a better job next year of making sure this project doesn’t slip too far into the year. Usually, we put all of the books out when they arrive and let the students start checking them out. However, with only 8 days of school remaining, I handed this dilemma to the group. There was a lot of debate about whether or not to have a special checkout of just book budget books or to wait until the opening of the library in the fall. After a lot of discussion, the students decided that they wanted to wait and have these books be the first new books available to students in the fall. It’s always nice to start the new school year with some exciting new books.

As we unpacked the books, we checked them off of our packing slips. I had already cataloged the Avid books and uploaded the MARC records for Capstone, so the books were ready to go into circulation. Once they were checked off the list. Capstone sent us some special labels to put inside our books so that students could indicate books that they chose for the order.

Each student chose a label, wrote his or her name on the label, and added it to the inside cover. Students also stamped the books with our library stamp.

The excitement was high and it was so much fun to see the students immediately diving into the books. They all tucked away around the library to read by themselves or with a partner. Before they left, the book budget students did get to checkout a few of the books to read over the next few days. They will return these books to the boxes so that they are ready for the next school year.

We are eagerly awaiting our final order from Capstone which should be arriving in the next few days.

A few weeks ago our local independent bookshop, Avid Bookshop, emailed me with an opportunity. Sarah Weeks, author of Pie and many other great books, was coming to Athens, and they wanted her to visit our school. Hooray! I try to jump at every author visit I can get. For the visit, I needed to presale some books, which I always do, but this time we wanted to try something new and crazy. I’ve always wanted to do a school wide read, but I have never gotten the idea off the ground. I saw this as a perfect chance to try it with a smaller number of students rather than the whole school. This author visit focused on upper grades. Our 5th graders would be gone to Skidaway on a field trip, so 3rd and 4th grade would be the classes coming to the visit. Rather than asking every student to buy a copy of the book, I decided to try a GoFundMe campaign to raise enough money to give every 3rd and 4th grader a copy of Pie as well as buy a few copies of Honey to give away to a few students.

In just under 1 month, 28 donors funded our project. These donors included community members, grandparents, families, and friends from around the country. Thank you to each one of these donors who made this crazy idea a reality.

When Sarah Weeks came to visit our school, I got to make the exciting announcement and tell them about the 28 people who took time to donate money to the project. I also told them that the deal from me is that I want each one of them to read Pie. I want them to share it with families and spend time talking about it. I also want them to make things together like family recipes or even pies. My hope is that they will document this over the summer on a Padlet.

Sarah Weeks was phenomenal in her visit and I highly recommend her to any schools looking for a great author visit. She built so many frequently asked questions into her talk such as “What was your first book?”, “What is your current book?”, “Do you get writer’s block?”, etc. Each question was answered with slides filled with great photographs, personal stories, and lots of funny moments. The students laughed so much at Sarah’s stories about boys painting their fingernails, kids doing puppets shows through the shirts, and dogs joining.

She talked about a story arc and had students moving their hands to show the flow of a story through beginning, middle, and end. She also told them a story about a cowboy on a horse in the airport and paused along the way to point out what part of the arc she was in during the story. What a great connection to what they are learning in writing class!

She showed them the many revisions that her work goes through and how important it is to listen to her editor. She connected this to all of the notes that students see on their writing papers and stressed how they needed to listen to their teachers’ comments because it helps make the writing better.

Sarah has so many books that she couldn’t talk about them all. She started with books like the Oggie Cooder books and how he charves cheese into the shapes of states.

Sarah’s two new books are Glamourpuss and Honey. She treated the students to a full reading of Glamourpuss and the high-energy students were mesmerized. I loved how she showed Honey to the students. She showed several slides with single words that helped students know some things the books was about, but then she showed students several characters from the book along with text from the book that gave the students a taste of the character.

Then, she showed the students how she had to do research to learn about how nail polish is made. This story connected with a great story about how some girls in a library were painting their nails and several boys were very curious. The librarian at the school hosted a nails at noon session in the library and it was attended by mostly boys who painted their nails and posed for some fierce pictures.

I couldn’t believe how much Sarah packed into an hour long presentation. There was even time for Q & A. She was engaging, funny, and a pro at keeping the student’s attention. I loved getting to hang out with Sarah Weeks even for a brief time. She is a fun person and a talented writer.

Thank you Avid Bookshop and Scholastic for bringing her to our school. Thank you to all of the donors who got Pie into the hands of all of our kids.

As I went to car riders today, I saw several students in the hallway already reading their books while they waited. That’s what it’s all about!

It has been some time since I did traditional types of centers that student rotate through. Third grade is currently working on a Dr. Seuss author study as they close out the year, and they wondered what students might do in the library related to Dr. Seuss. We looked at the days on the calendar along with everything that has to be done and decided that there wasn’t time to pull off a project around Dr. Seuss and really give it the time it needed. Instead, we decided that I would give students some experiences to connect with Dr. Seuss as enrichment.

Before student arrived, I setup the 5 centers around the library so that they were somewhat in a circular arrangement. I wrote the 5 centers on the whiteboard so that students could check the order as needed.

When students arrived, I explained each center very briefly and then we numbered off 1-5 to begin centers. Each center lasted about 10 minutes before rotating to the next center.

Center 1: Tongue Twisters

Listen to our tongue twisters here!

I found a variety of tongue twister online as well as some Dr. Seuss books that had more tongue twisting lines than others. At this center, students practiced reading tongue twisters from the table, recited ones they already knew, or even made up their own. When they found one they were happy with, they recorded the tongue twister on Flipgrid. They loved listening to how other students sounded and many students “liked” other student videos. Most students recorded more than one tongue twister while at this station. I had fun with one student writing a variation of Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Her family own a pickle business, so we were trying to change the words to match her family business. We came up with “The Phickle Chickle picked a peck of Phickles Pickles.” I encouraged her to continue writing her version and we would record it sometime.

Rather than waiting until the end to have students check out books, I made it a center. Students could check out up to 5 books or just browse the library if they had enough books out already.

Center 3: Seussville on computers

I setup 5 Lenovo computers with the Seussville website pulled up. Most of the students had never visited this site, so this gave them some time to explore the videos, games, and activities that fill this site. Many found things that they wanted to print out and do later, so I hope some students discovered some summer activities.

Center 4: iPad apps

I downloaded 2 free iPad apps related to Dr. Seuss. One is the Happy Birthday to You camera. This was definitely the most popular app of the two. Students enjoyed taking selfies or pictures of friends and then using the stickers to develop their own Seuss personality. This would have been a great lead in to creative writing. Students could have created their picture and then developed an accompanying story to match the picture. The other app was the Dr. Seuss Fun Machine, but students moved away from it fairly quickly due to its simplicity and lack of clear instructions.

Center 5: Seuss books

We have SO MANY Dr. Seuss books in the library, but it’s amazing how many of them students have never seen or read. I loved having a station built in where students could just spend time browsing Seuss books, reading along, or buddy reading. This was a center that most of the teachers visited along with students to read with them or listen to them read.

This was a wonderful end of the year activity, but I saw several potential opportunities that could have taken us into a larger project or even just a follow-up lesson. It reminded me that centers can serve many purposes and are still a great way to split students up into a variety of experiences.

We have such an amazing community. Anytime we have a wish or a dream that we put out there, we somehow find a way to make it happen. This year, our supportive PTA budgeted money for us to have a school-wide author or illustrator visit. These types of visits are huge learning experiences for our students because they connect them to the real people behind the books on our shelves and inspire their own art and stories. Author/illustrator visits are hard to do for an entire school every year because they take a lot of financial support to pay speaking fees and travel for the author/illustrator. I am so thankful that our PTA brought Gregory Christie to our school this year for every grade.

R. Gregory Christie has been working as an illustrator for over 20 years.

He has illustrated over fifty books,as well as collaborated with clients

such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vibe, The Wall Street Journal,

The New York Times, The Kennedy Center, Pete Seeger, Queen Latifah ,

and Karyn Parsons on a variety of projects.

Our day kicked off with Kindergarten and 1st grade in their own sessions. Mr. Christie took time to read a bit of A Chance to Shine and talk about how he connects the text of the story to his art. What the students in these grades loved the most was seeing an illustration come to life before their eyes. It was like magic. Mr. Christie got the students to come up with some drawing ideas. They wanted a cat. Then he asked them to think about more details, so they added a bad cat from Korea. Using these details, he started to draw. He constantly checked in with them to see if his drawing was matching the text. If it wasn’t, they gave him reminders and held him accountable for what to draw. I loved how he connected this to what an editor does.

During our 1st grade visit, we had a bit of excitement: a real fire emergency. We all had to evacuate while fire trucks and firefighters came to investigate our building. The kids were fantastic, and Mr. Christie was so flexible with this unexpected part of our day. First grade came back in for a few more minutes and we adjusted our schedule for the rest of the day.

Our 2nd and 3rd graders had a chance to really study some paintings and consider the mood of them. They also compared two paintings to see what was similar and different.

These students loved it when Mr. Christie drew the face of Jazz Baby but then let students come up and collaborate on the drawing to help tell a story. They only had few seconds to add to the drawing. He started asking them to be accountable for their work by telling what they were trying to achieve by drawing what they did. After several students, he came in and added his own twist to the drawing.

Mr. Christie visited both PreK classes individually and read Jazzy Baby and A Chance to Shine. Then, he took time to draw Jazz Baby and some other things like birds and dogs. The kids loved having those illustrations left in their class. My favorite part of this time was when the PreK students were able to show him their artwork and talk about what they did in their own artwork that was inspired by his artwork. This was so empowering for our smallest students.

In our 4th and 5th grade, students had a special treat. They saw Mr. Christie’s first book that he has written and illustrated. It isn’t published yet, but they were treated to parts of the F & G version of the book. He also took them through several of the books and how the illustrations came together. Students saw the very first book that Gregory Christie did called Palm of My Heart. It was great to see this first book side by side with the newest book to see how his illustrations changed or stayed the same. Students shared a lot about why Mousetropolis stood out to them with its cute mice and its vibrant colors. These students were also treated to a special video production that is yet to be released about an African American ballet performer. It was a session full of special opportunities for our students.

I loved capturing some words from Gregory Chrisitie throughout the day. Students heard:

“When a book starts it’s a manuscript. When the book it comes to me. The words can help you feel that it’s an upbeat bright colored book.”

“It’s graphic. You see a lot of negative and positive space.”

It takes about a year to do a book.

Body language is important when you are illustrating a book.

I know these students will remember this visit for years to come. We now have all of our Gregory Christie books autographed and ready for checkout in the library. Thank you again to our PTA for this opportunity, and thank you Avid Bookshop for helping with our book sales.